Present technology is witnessing the development of large remote databases or “data warehouses”, as well as rapid expansion of the Internet and proliferation of corporate intranets. Demand is growing for increasingly large and rapid data transfers involving streaming video, visualization graphics and large data warehouse downloads over such new network protocols as the Fast Ethernet and Gigabyte Ethernet. The data which it would be desirable to access may be stored across heterogeneous sites, i.e., sites which contain different types of database systems or other data containers. Hence the data which may need to be accessed may be referred to as “heterogeneous data.”.
At the same time as demand has grown for large and rapid data transfers, there has been constant pressure to simplify the user interface to a vast array of components and data storage facilities. While individual components in a particular solution are often easy to use, combining them in a complete solution still presents extremely complex problems to the user.
In addition to simplifying the user interface to heterogeneous data and complex arrays of components, it appears desirable to provide the user with added capabilities to readily command and perform more powerful automated data processing operations, in addition to simple “search” queries.